I’ll tell you about the latest electoral scuffles in Germany
Facts, names and controversies about the election campaign in Germany. Pierluigi Mennitti's article from Berlin
Annalena Baerbock fails to free the Greens' election campaign from the shallows it has ended up in due to a long series of small and large stumbles, which it has stumbled upon after a brilliant start. To the blunders and "oversights" of the past few weeks was added, lastly, the controversy on copying for his book, a pamphlet halfway between the electoral program and the vision of the future. To raise the accusation of plagiarism, in Germany a club with which by now to beat every ambition of politicians, it was not even a German, but a Viennese media expert, Stefan Weber, a guy who introduces himself on his blog as a "hunter of plagiarism ”and which paradoxically in 2017 was commissioned by the European Greens to draw up a report on the risks of glyphosate.
Once again on the defensive, Baerbock downplayed plagiarism by arguing (indeed with some reason) that its publication is a political instant book and not a dissertation or scientific work. To have sacked the party program or – as Weber now claims – Joschka Fischer's interviews without citing them would be a venial sin: after all, Baerbock is the standard-bearer of ecological theses. But the charge of moralism with which the Greens have often supported the political confrontation with their opponents now backfires, and the voters would still have liked a possible future chancellor to present in a book her ideas and not those of the noble father of the party. Even the attempt to throw it on the gender issue ("Baerbock is attacked as a woman") holds little and pushes the candidate into the corner of victimhood: misogyny does not reconcile with an electorate that has elected a woman at the top of the country for 16 years . Nor is the victimization towards the press credible: according to an investigation by the authoritative Neue Zürcher Zeitung , German political journalists seem to have an attitude of respect for the Greens, at least by analyzing the tweets they published in this election campaign.
So the polls go lower and lower: the Grünen have dropped to 20%, according to the latest Insa survey also to 19, they are closely followed by the Social Democrats and increasingly distant from the dream of playing the chancellery with the Christian Democrats.
Who gloats is Armin Laschet . He finds himself in a position to do what he does best: play on the bank. The Union candidate has already assumed the institutional tone of someone who does not have to prove anything, even though he has not yet proved anything. His game resembles that of a football team devoted to counterattacking, to which the opponents gave an own goal in the first minutes: now it is a question of patience, moving carefully, waiting for the imbalances of others and hitting from the sidelines.
All the small scandals that accompanied the Union, first of all that of the trade in masks in which some parliamentarians were involved, are forgotten. The future of the country after the Merkel era is at stake and voters seem to have lost their desire to experiment more or less colorful revolutions: to overcome the immobility of the Chancellor's last years, they are satisfied with the generic Laschetian promise of a decade of modernization. Whatever it means, it doesn't seem like a project capable of revolutionizing existences. Go on slowly and experiment only "just enough", like the doses of salt in balanced soups.
The new leader of the CDU always finds the median answers on the issues that in this first segment of German holidays are thrilling the press. If some CDU deputies ask for hefty fines for those who do not show up for the second vaccination, he replies that the punishments lead nowhere and that it is better to intensify positive communication on vaccines. To the Greens who propose motorway speed limits to protect the environment, he replies that it would be counterintuitive to limit, for example, the speed of electric cars and that in any case the average speed on the motorway is already below any limit: yes to climate protection , but also focusing on technologies. The Union has regained the center of gravity of politics and Laschet now appears to be the most reliable helmsman among the candidates in the running.
Will it last until September? Likely, given the alternatives. Olaf Scholz, the "right-wing social democrat" who runs for a party whose leaders all come from the left-most wing, burns enthusiasm and energy in an attempt to revive what was once one of the two pillars of the Bundesrepublik. Cold, reasoning, Hanseatic, he has everything it would take to attract entrepreneurs and the economic world, it is a pity that they look the other way. It is a pity that the SPD has become convinced that its problem is that it has lost the old thread of left-wing battles. In search of the lost (and perhaps disappeared) workers, the party looks like a two-faced Janus, with leaders looking on one side and the candidate on the other.
The Schröderian synthesis is lost, if not denied, locked up in the basement of the turn of the century together with the third Clintonian way and the Blairian New Labor. However, another road has not been found. So Scholz advances alone, with the only hope that the Greens will bake a little more and that the shame of third place can be avoided. The future is the opposition, where to try to regenerate. A new edition of the Grosse Koalition is excluded.
Behind the signs of life come from the liberals, oscillating in the polls between 11 and 13%. They are driven by the return to the scene of the mistreated middle class and entrepreneurs, disappointed by the inaction of the Merkelian epilogue and suspicious of the radicalism of the Greens. The Fdp has a great desire to return to the government, after having lived through two legislatures the hell of extra-parliamentarism and its leader Christian Lindner is willing to do so also by embracing the Grünen in a Jamaica coalition with the Union: the same he had failed four years ago. But then Angela Merkel would be at the head, this time Laschet would be there, and the liberals trust him. Another card in the hands of the president of North Rhine-Westphalia: perhaps the CDU was not wrong to rely on him.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/vi-racconto-le-ultime-baruffe-elettorali-in-germania/ on Tue, 06 Jul 2021 05:31:17 +0000.